Enemies at Home Read Online Free PDF Page B

explore.
    The apartment was unsymmetrical due to the street-plan outside. The front row of street shops meant there was a very long entrance corridor through them, after which came a decorative space that would have been an atrium, except that upper storey apartments overhead prevented it having an open roof. Where a collecting pool for rainwater might have been stood only a marble table: rectangular, heavy supports at each end, nothing on it. Unexciting. I would have kicked it out and got a rude statue.
    Beyond the roofed hallway and overlooked from above was an open courtyard; looking across it should have given a fine view to impress important visitors. Not impressive, in this case. Too small and bare, with no flowers, and scruffy colonnades where the cheap pillars had chipped. Again, statues would have helped. If they existed, they had been taken away to Campania (low plinths remained, so this was likely).
    The room allocated to me and other good guest bedrooms lay to right and left of the entrance suite, facing onto the courtyard. There were three or four, all handsome.
    On the left were summer and winter dining rooms. Since they both faced the same way, the distinction was pointless. They had folding door-leaves that could be opened for air and a garden vista, had there been one – I made a mental note to ask ‘Diomedes, 47, gardener’ how exactly he spent his time, since he cannot have been tending topiary.
    Over on the far side of the courtyard lay a service area, fairly well disguised. More prominently, the best feature of this apartment was a large, double height saloon. There I discovered the kind of domestic basilica that is supposed to give people of status somewhere to hold banquets or semi-public meetings – judicial hearings by minor magistrates or local government gatherings, when they are convened in a big man’s private house. Inside, it had two rows of columns dividing the space into a nave and side-aisles, although as this was a modest property not the elite home it wanted to be, the ceiling height, even in the domed centre, was too low. The only light came through high square windows, so the interior was as gloomy as tenements back in Fountain Court, where I lived. And I can tell you that Manlius Faustus and his uncle were important in their community, but I had been in their house, which was bigger than this, yet they did not bother to have a Corinthian oecus, as I knew such saloons are called.
    I was acquiring a feel for the Aviola residence and its owners. Comfortably off − or in well-hidden debt. Outwardly ambitious, but trying harder than funds allowed. An absolutely typical Roman family, in fact.
    I wondered what the man had done in life. Then I wondered how much dowry the new wife had brought in. I would have to ask.
    Either side of the oecus stood the best bedrooms. One was completely empty. In homes where the husband and wife wanted their own rooms, they would snaffle one each of these, separated by their prized Corinthian saloon. With the newly-weds, decisions may not yet have been taken. Following their wedding, while desire was warm, the couple had shared the second bedroom, the one closest to the courtyard corner. The freedman Polycarpus had identified it when talking to Faustus and me. He had also mentioned that the scene had been tidied up, but since I knew what had taken place there, I braced myself before I went in.
     
    It was a pleasant room. A good size. Frescos with flower garlands and mythological plaques, on a white ground. Black and white mosaic on the floor, with slightly lopsided panels depicting the four seasons. A bed with high ends and back, against the right hand wall. Someone had remade the bed, plumping its pillows, smoothing and tightly tucking in the corners of its undersheet and carefully arranging the colourful coverlet so it hung down evenly.
    There were cupboards and clothes chests. A long footstool, probably repositioned neatly after the fracas, stood by the